Knopf publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards kindly plunked us onto his Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100. We'd note that we're run out of basements throughout the NY-metro area (and not just NJ), but we're too busy telling the Stieg Larsson estate to eat our dust.

Pacific StandardsprofilesKen Layne who quietly started the popular quarterly literary magazine, Desert Oracle for a town of 8,000 people. Now it has gained far more readers than that as it highlights works related to the American desert. "The reason that the Oracle works is that it's always trying to elicit that feeling, the awe and wonder that the desert reveals to you when you listen hard enough. Layne believes it's not an accident that religious awakenings, UFO sightings, walkabouts, and other revelations occur in the desert. It's a consequence of solitude, stark beauty, and the tenacious life that only the desert has."

It’s a truth as old as academia: graduate students moan about the lengths of their dissertations. But which grad students are most entitled to complain? Herewith, a chart that compares dissertation lengths by major.

Must female characters always stand in the shadow of the institution of marriage? Ivan Kreilkamp writes on female bachelors, from Renata Adler’sSpeedboat to Elizabeth Hardwick’sSleepless Nights. Pair with this Millions essay on Adler’s piecemeal novel.